This season has been all about the unexpected

Imagine, please, that you’ve been having the season from hell, one that started brightly and later looked like it would end without reward, only for a crazy run of results to leave you within salivating sight of silver plated glory. Imagine further that you have won eight of your last nine league games, and that one of those was a 2-0 win against the team you are about to play. What do you do when you’re going into a match that will effectively decide who gets to lift the Premier League trophy, but that match is at Old Trafford against Manchester United? I think one of the things you’d have to do is sit down with the team and say “look lads, we know we can win this if we shut the crowd up. For God’s sake, whatever you do, don’t let them get an early goal.” Chelsea are a good team. I expected them to be able to keep it cagey at the start, to blunt United’s pea-like picador and corner their ferocious balding bull. [caption id=“attachment_6256” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson (extreme right) celebrates with Darren Gibson (centre) and Chris Smalling at Old Trafford. Phil Noble/Reuters”]  [/caption] I didn’t expect to see Hernandez celebrating after 35 seconds. I didn’t expect Alex Ferguson to have a look on his face that said ‘Och, I’ve won another one’ within the first minute. I’m not saying the result wasn’t still in doubt at that point, just that I hoped for something more exciting. Then I thought about the whole season – it hasn’t been all that exciting, it’s just been full of the unexpected. Remember Chelsea’s start? They began their title defence by 6-0 twice. They were all conquering, nothing was going to stop them, they would crash through the league like Michael Essien crashes through tackles. When they started losing no one had expected it, and no one could explain it. One of the most bizarre aspects was the decline of Didier Drogba. He wasn’t injured, he just wasn’t working properly. Of all the reasons there could have been, no one expected the real problem to be that he had been suffering from malaria for months without realising, and that had led to a partial deterioration in his work-rate as a professional footballer. It is a serious disease, but given that he’s all recovered now, you have to laugh about that – I mean, who expected that even he was as hard as that? I’m also convinced that only real United fans expected them to win the league this year. Shorn of Cristiano Ronaldo and looking to the laughable Nani, the lazy Berbatov, the untried Hernandez and, most of all, the wantaway Wayne Rooney, who could have expected this result? It turns out that Nani is a genius, Chicarito a Godsend, and Rooney a salvageable human being. Ji-Sung Park, meanwhile, has proven that you don’t need a lot of ability even at the top, just hard work, like old folks keep saying. It’s not just weird that they won the league with this team, they did it with Berbatov warming the bench towards the end of the season. There are many who might argue that that’s where he belongs. I bet those people didn’t expect that, with two games to go, the lanky Bulgarian would be sitting on top of the Premier League goal scorers table. It’s weird. Another strange thing, just in case you thought it was only crazy at the top. Every year, the Football Writers Association gets all the Football journalists in the UK (the ones who count at least) to vote for their player of the season. Just to give you an idea of who they usually go for, the last five winners were Cristiano Ronaldo (twice) Wayne Rooney, Steven Gerrard and Thierry Henry. The players also vote for their top player of the year, and over the last five years the only difference to the list above is Ryan Giggs instead of Henry. This year, the players went for Gareth Bale. The writers went for Scott Parker. That would be the midfielder who plays for West Ham, bottom of the league as it stands. For the players, he didn’t even make the Team of the Year. So, was Parker head and shoulders above the rest this season, or was he merely an average player who doesn’t deserve great accolades. It’s not a question I expected to be pondering.